Medical facilities, such as hospitals, nursing homes, and the like, have a centralized location such as a pharmacy department or materials management department within the facility to coordinate the dispensing of drugs or medical supplies to the patients of the medical facility. The departments utilizing medications and medical supplies in such facilities have long been burdened with the increasingly complex record keeping and inventory management that results from caring for hundreds, if not thousands, of patients every day. Various methods have been employed to assist a centralized pharmacy or other centralized medical supply departments with maintaining accurate records while attempting to reduce the burden of managing all of the information associated with the distribution of medications and medical supplies. The responsibilities of the centralized supply include: filling individual patient prescriptions on a daily basis; administering drugs using the five rights: right drug, right patient, right dose, right time and right route, dispensing medical supplies to patients; maintaining sufficient inventory of each drug or medical supply so as to have sufficient quantities on hand to administer to patients on a daily basis; tracking of drug interactions to prevent a patient from being given a drug that has adverse affects when combined with other drugs; accounting for the purchase of medications and medical supplies for use in the facility; accounting associated with dispensing of medications and medical supplies to individual patients; tracking of medication expiration dates to rid inventories of expired medications; and tracking of drug lot numbers, for example, in the event of a recall of a particular drug or drug lot number.
Medical facilities will dispense medications in one of three modes: centralized, decentralized, or a hybrid of partial decentralization. In facilities that are partly or fully decentralized, a very important function of the centralized pharmacy or materials management department is to restock various inventory locations, e.g., nurses stations, unit-based cabinets, satellite pharmacies, or off-site facilities in a network, with the quantity and types of medications and medical supplies that must be dispensed by the decentralized locations on a daily basis.
Replenishing the inventory in a centralized hospital-wide nursing unit-based cabinet (UBC) system is a time consuming, laborious, and often awkward process for pharmacy departments. The typical manual pick process using paper-based replenishment reports is certainly not optimal. In the typical manual pick process, a hard copy report is generated manually. The pharmacy technician or worker responsible for filling the orders works from the hard copy report is required to pick the requested items. This process is time consuming and complex. Patient barcode labels are generally not used. Additionally, the manual pick process requires significant staff training and practice as well as inventory memorization. The accuracy and safety of the picks are ensured by a manual check of the medications against the dispensing list. Additionally, restocking and billing requires the manual count of medications and completion of paperwork. Finally, medication inventory management is performed by manual, time-consuming counts and replenishments must be ordered manually. Thus, pharmacy departments are very interested in a better way of managing their current UBC replenishment processes.
Automated systems for dispensing and restocking inventory are currently used in pharmacies in place of the manual pick process. For example, “pick-to-light” technology or a “place-to-light” may be used. Both of these systems involve the use of specially designed, hardwired workstations and pharmacy units. While these systems offer substantial advantages over the manual pick process, some facilities may not have the resources to convert to such an automated system and basically reengineer the whole pharmacy. Therefore, the need exists for an automated inventory management system that improves workflow, safety and cost efficiency to hospital pharmacies of any size volume or staffing level.